Have you ever felt that your cities (especially the first) took forever to develop? Have you ever felt your non-pathfinding units took forever to move around the map? If you are concerned about game speed and also wish for better balance, this mod may be of interest.

The changes in this version were primarily motivated 1) to speed up the game by adding 1 movement to most units, reducing building costs and increasing city growth. Units with 2+ movement also allow greater diversity as a minimum of 2 movement is adequate in most situations.2) balance races, units, heroes, buildings, and magic realms, not necessarily the same way Aureus did. 3) edit out or around the various bugs in the game, including many spells (full credit to Aureus)4) swimming settlers (breaks the theme but circumvents a fatal flaw from AI)5) A few strange units or potentially controversial changes, such as magic-casting colossi, different paladins, or draconian's airships being used for transport.

The end result is a combat system where units can reach ranged units (instead of waiting for units to deplete ranged attacks). Increase in movement increases usefulness of basic units and makes wizards rely less on magic spirits for exploration. The change also makes abilities such as forester useful for slow troop units. But most importantly, it is no longer a drag to explore and conquer. It should now be essential to quickly conquer a few neutral towns and maybe even a wizard with early units such as war bears and halberdiers. Given faster exploration, city growth was sped up for balancing purposes. Thanks to faster city development and easier way of settling new towns, it naturally speeds up research and skill development (especially if towns can build universities and wizard guilds)

Balancing the game allows more flexible strategic planning and arguably more challenging opponents due to all units being useful in some circumstances. Therefore, the AI’s poor unit-selection skills are less detrimental to their overall power.